Ann-Marie MacDonald took five years to write Fayne. C. Bell’s fantastic story — an imposing and complex novel of some 800 pages —, for which she completely immersed herself in the Victorian era, studying lifestyles, scientific and medical knowledge and practices, beliefs, the rights of women and minorities and conceptions related to gender and the margins.
From this exhaustive research, she drew a fascinating story, full of mysteries, secrets revealed to light, unexpected twists and turns and coincidences as extraordinary as they are inevitable, which unfold in dark, austere and intriguing contexts, detailed down to to materialize before the eyes of the reader.
The Montreal writer, who was born to a Scottish father and a Lebanese mother on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in the former West Germany, made the codes of Victorian literature a veritable playground in this fourth novel which visibly pays homage to the Brontë sisters.
“Many of us recognize and love these themes: frightening mansions, family secrets, hidden origins and inheritance quarrels,” underlines the author, met by The duty to Montreal. Victorian Gothic literature is like a toy box full of treasures and disguises for me to enjoy. »
Fayne tells the story of Charlotte Bell, a 12-year-old girl who grows up on a vast estate surrounded by a bog, located on the border of Scotland and England. Orphaned by her mother, the latter having given up the ghost by giving her life, Charlotte lives alone with her father, Lord Henri Bell, as well as with the ghost of her brother, the long-awaited heir, who also died before her birth. .
Curious and intelligent, the teenager, deprived of schooling due to a strange medical condition which endangers her health, acquires encyclopedic knowledge on her own. When Charlotte’s appetite for learning exceeds her father’s abilities, Lord Henry breaks with tradition and hires a tutor from Edinburgh, whom he orders to “educate his daughter as he would educate his son, if he had one.” “.
One evening, while the tutor flees without warning, Charlotte begins to doubt what her father told her and embarks on an adventure and a series of questions that will lead her to unravel the secrets of her family and to shed light on his famous “condition”.
Storytelling Prowess
Like most of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novels, Fayne was born from a simple image. “This time it was a mysterious undulating landscape. I didn’t know if it was water or windswept moor. Then, in the upper right corner, I added an old stone mansion. I looked at my drawing, and I understood that I was in the land of the Brontë sisters. I also sketched the silhouette of a young person, hair blowing in the wind, dressed in a Byronesque style. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. Below I wrote a quote: “I heard something in the bog” I had to follow these three ellipsis and unravel the mystery of what would become Charlotte Bell. »
Taking advantage of the feeling of strangeness and the unsaid punctuating the daily lives of the families who populate our Victorian imagination, the writer has constructed a novel which adopts the perspective of different characters through the eras. We therefore share the point of view and alternative truths of Charlotte as a child, then as an adult, as well as those of her mother, Mae, and her aunt Clarissa.
This construction allows the story to take unexpected paths, to fool the reader by making him doubt his own conclusions, while he jumps, like the protagonist, from discovery to discovery, from surprise to surprise.
“The writing proved to be a great technical challenge. When do we change our point of view? What do we understand, when and through what perspective? Who believes who, who believes what? I felt like I was doing math. At least three times, I attempted to continue my story based on a character’s lie, before realizing that what I was composing was false and was not taking me in the right direction. So I had to resort to lists, to recipes, which I spread out on the floor of my office. Then, I had to both read with my eyes and suspend my own beliefs and knowledge in order to put myself in the reader’s shoes. »
Good intentions
Ann-Marie MacDonald twists the context and familiar codes of the Victorian novel to address eminently contemporary subjects, including questions of identity and gender, gender inequalities and the queer experience, subjects on which very few people , at the time, had the language to express themselves.
“It turned out to be an era of extraordinary discoveries in the West. A few years after the events of my story, Einstein and his wife will together formulate the theory of relativity, although Mileva Einstein is never given credit. Freud will publish his work on the interpretation of dreams. The Impressionists will revolutionize pictorial art. The Great War changed the face of the world. People realize that not everything they believed is necessarily true. Sexuality, feminism, democracy… Everything is set in motion. It’s bubbling. »
In medicine, in science, in psychiatry, Victorian society — or at least its men — created boxes, categories, to better understand the world, define the different species and the divergences between human beings. These categories, however, carry glaring injustices, from which, as the novel demonstrates, we are still learning to disentangle ourselves today.
“The history of ideas fascinates me. Those who hold power decide the directions that research will take. Everything that is done takes place in a historical and political context. Likewise, I am fascinated and deeply troubled by what can happen when helpless people—especially women, minorities, children, animals, and the Earth—are subjected to the well-intentioned gaze of medicine and politics. . It’s bad enough if that look is ill-intentioned, but when a doctor or politician tells you they’re doing something “for your own good,” that’s when the real trouble starts. »
Thus, Charlotte and her mother will become the victims of specialists convinced that they are making the right decisions, who will prevent them from speaking and living their truth and will create much suffering that could have been avoided.
Tragic, often cruel and unfair, Fayne is also deeply luminous, and reminds us that it is in the strength of the community, in its ability to take care of its own garden, that the salvation of individuals and of humanity rests.